'Reading is an obsession,'she says

Joanne Gans describes lifelong love of written word.

Joanne Gans describes lifelong love of written word.

April 30, 2007|ANN LEONARD Tribune Correspondent

When Joanne Gans' parents felt they needed to punish her, they wouldn't let her read. "A really severe punishment would be no reading for a week," she said. "Reading is an obsession," she said. She came from a family of avid readers. At the age of 90, her father was studying Icelandic and Russian in order to read sagas in the original. Her mother read three books a week well into her 90s. Joanne grew up in South Bend with three brothers and two sisters on the corner of Eddy and St. Vincent streets. That's not far from Notre Dame, where her father, George Wack, was a professor of German for 36 years. Her mother, Eleanor, lived to be almost 102 years old. The childhood house is now boarded up and will be torn down by Notre Dame. Joanne remembers with great affection "the little old square house." Joyce Kilmer's poem "The House With Nobody In It" resonates with her. "But a house that has done what a house should do, a house that has sheltered life, That has put its loving wooden arms around a man and his wife, A house that has echoed a baby's laugh and held up his stumbling feet, Is the saddest sight, when it's left alone that ever your eyes could meet." Joyce Kilmer's wife, Aline Murray Kilmer, was also a poet, and the couple had five children. Aline's poems under the title "Candles that Burn" are favorites of Joanne. Her poems are "very much a mother's poetry. They aren't great but have good insights." Joanne began to read in first grade and reads standing or sitting, whenever she has a spare minute. "This might be while waiting for the dinner to cook," she said. "My brothers' favorite memory of me as a child is a book in one hand and reading while stirring the pot. They don't know that I still do this." Joanne's brother, professor John Wack, is retired from the History Department at Jesuit University in Wheeling, W.Va., and the siblings share similar tastes in books. He sends Joanne boxes of books to read and share with family and friends. Joanne and her husband, Ray Gans, have a son, four daughters, nine grandchildren, one great-grandchild and "one on the way." Joanne and Ray have traveled throughout the world and have spent lots of time sailing their own boat, or bare-boating in the Caribbean with friends. When Joanne spoke of the author Donna Leon, whose mysteries are set in Venice, she said, "Having been in Venice even for a short time makes it easy to picture the places described in the book." Joanne said firmly, "I do not care for books that have a great deal of violence in them and refuse to read those with frequent sections that want to instruct you explicitly in sex. "It was simply not done in good literature when I was young, but now even some of my favorite authors seem to feel that a lot of sex is necessary to sell their books." Joanne's parents watched what she and her twin sister Marianne (Doran) read to ensure they did not become desensitized to right and wrong. Librarians also did their part protecting children, and the St. Joseph County Public Library devoted its top floor to the children's section. Children needed permission to take out books from the adult section. Friends loan her books, and she is a sucker for books at garage sales. "I choose books by authors, by book reviews and by chance -- appealing dust jackets," she said. Inspiration can come from the lightest books -- "perhaps in a line or two -- which I ponder and delight in for weeks." Besides being a passionate reader, Joanne is a painter of pastels at Studio Arts Center and she is a member of the Northern Indiana Pastel Society. She volunteers regularly for the Christ Child Society and Memorial Hospital. She restores and digitizes old pictures, which prompted her "to wonder about these people in the pictures." She now is researching and writing a history of her husband Ray's great-grandfather Jacobs, who took his family from Minnesota to Washington state in 1867-68 via the route through North Dakota. Jacobs was part of the Davy Wagon Train, named for Captain Davy who led it. Joanne is using material for her "Jacobs' Saga" from a daily account by a man named Lueg, who accompanied the train, and from two other accounts written later by people who had been on the train. Because she is so busy, Joanne looks for books she can pick up for 20 minutes, or read before she falls asleep. Living on the south side of South Bend, she loves to go to the library branch on Kern and Miami. "It's a joy," she said. Science fiction and fantasy supply many of the books Joanne reads, and she loves the way authors like Ursula K. Le Guin ("The Left Hand of Darkness") and Patricia A. Mc Killip ("Cygnet") create a totally different world and make it seem real. The characters do understandable things, and the author lets them grow. "However, if a character does do something 'out of character' I want the author to explain why."